March 22, 1998

By JAMES F. O'GORMAN

COUNTRY, PARK, & CITY
The Architecture and Life
of Calvert Vaux. By Francis R. Kowsky. Illustrated. 378 pp. New York: Oxford University Press. $45.

ew Yorkers know more of Calvert Vaux's work than they realize; the rest of the country knows too little. He remains uncelebrated by all but
specialists because he was an introvert who frequently joined gifted and outgoing associates. Although he had an equal -- if not upper -- hand in the design of Central Park and of Prospect Park in Brooklyn, as well as many other New York
landmarks, he has been overshadowed by his more famous colleague, Frederick Law Olmsted, and by better-known architects. In ''Country, Park, & City,'' Francis R. Kowsky, a professor of art history at Buffalo State
College and author of a 1980 work on Vaux's erstwhile partner Frederick C. Withers, seeks to cast his subject in a well-deserved limelight.

English-born and London-trained, Vaux was poised to begin his career in architecture when he meet Andrew Jackson Downing in 1850. Downing stood at the peak of his reputation as a horticulturist and landscape designer. He hired Vaux to assist him in the
architectural phase of his practice, headquartered at Newburgh, N.Y., on the Hudson River. Within four months Vaux became Downing's partner, and less than two years later, when Downing died in a riverboat accident, he inherited --
still in his 20's -- his associate's mantle. Downing had published works on the theory and practice of landscape gardening, and, in loose association with the architect A. J. Davis, books on rural homes. Vaux's early works
carried on this line of Hudson River School architecture in both mansions and more modest structures.

For the brewer Matthew Vassar's estate near Poughkeepsie, for example, he designed in 1854 two unexecuted picturesque villas as well as a log-built hovel that, in the spirit of Marie Antoinette, Vassar cruelly called ''Uncle Tom's
Cabin'' (Mrs. Stowe's novel appeared in 1852). Vaux summed up this phase of his career in his ''Villas and Cottages'' (1857). By the date of that book, however, he had moved to Manhattan and begun to
contemplate the city's major new venture, the creation of a vast urban park.

Who designed Central Park? Most savvy New Yorkers would probably say Olmsted. Yet when the competition for the layout was held in 1857, Olmsted was a sometime (and frequently failed) farmer and well-known travel writer who had no design experience. It
was Vaux, as Downing's successor, who championed the competition, and it was he who approached Olmsted -- whom he had met through Downing -- with the proposal that they join forces on an entry. Kowsky thinks ''Vaux must
have gone to Olmsted bearing in his mind the fundamental artistic outlines of the Greensward plan, as well as the philosophical foundation on which it rested.'' That plan won the competition. When the more personable Olmsted
was given the title of architect in chief, his name became the one primarily identified with the park. Without diminishing Olmsted's role, Kowsky convincingly argues that Vaux should be given equal credit for the general layout of
the grounds. And he as well as Olmsted fought long and hard to preserve the original Greensward concept when it later came under attack by the bureaucracy.

Vaux and his other associates, including the brilliant and disreputable Jacob Wrey Mould, not Olmsted, were responsible for the park's splendid architectural accents: among them designs for more than 40 individually wrought bridges (which Kowsky
rather hyperbolically thinks ''Vaux's greatest architectural legacy''), the rugged, Romanesque Belvedere that focuses the view from the Terrace, and the Terrace itself. Although Vaux (and Olmsted) conceived the
park as, in Vaux's words, ''Nature first and 2d and 3d -- Architecture after a while,'' he created the Terrace as the park's centerpiece, embellishing it with carved natural ornament designed by Mould and
planning an unexecuted, overly ambitious sculptural program rich in Emersonian iconography. In this Vaux remained true to Downing's desire to merge architecture and nature.

Bridges, Belvedere and Terrace survive as major accents within the park and as witnesses to the diversity of Vaux's gifts. There are also in the city other reminders of his presence, although in some cases they are overwhelmed by later building.
With Mould he produced the initial design for the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Their original wing peeks out from subsequent additions and remodelings by other architects as pointed polychrome arches set in red brick walls. The equally
incongruous Victorian Gothic wing of the American Museum of Natural History is all that was executed of Vaux's grand project for that mammoth storehouse on Central Park West. His name also appears beside that of F. C. Withers in contemporary
accounts of the erection of the Jefferson Market Courthouse, although Kowsky discusses that delightfully picturesque wonder in his book on Withers rather than here.

Vaux contributed two important urban residential types: the upscale apartment house and its poorer cousin, the low-rent housing project. He was an early -- perhaps the earliest -- advocate of the domestic block, which he called ''Parisian flats.''
He delivered a paper on the subject in 1857, a dozen years before the building of Richard Morris Hunt's Stuyvesant Apartments. Here too Vaux has been denied his rightful place in history, for the Stuyvesant is usually considered the
first of its type. In the 1880's, Vaux turned his attention to housing for the city's poor, designing a building for the Improved Dwellings Association as well as other structures for low-cost lodgings and industrial schools.

Vaux's greatest single achievement would have been a project not intended for New York. His unexecuted design for the Centennial Exhibition, held in Philadelphia in 1876, a breathtakingly scaled pavilion conceived in collaboration with the engineer
George K. Radford, proposed to enclose 20 acres under pointed iron trusses forming 120-foot-high interior arches. It was to have been a ''grand whole'' of vast vistas through polychromed arcs -- rivaled only by an equally
dramatic scheme by the Philadelphians John McArthur Jr. and Joseph M. Wilson. Neither was erected. What were probably the most spectacular exposition designs of the 19th century foundered on cost. Although Vaux and Radford's was the
preferred design, the fair was housed along more conventional lines drawn by local architects.

Vaux's project for the Philadelphia fair was a triumph of large-scale Victorian Gothic design, and he held on to this picturesque propensity through the twilight of the style in the 80's and 90's. His elaborate 1886 model for Grant's
Tomb included a 270-foot Gothic tower; four years later the building committee chose John H. Duncan's project for a composition based on the famed fourth-century Mausoleum of Halicarnassos, the monument as eventually erected. By 1890
revived classicism was in full swing; Vaux's time had come and gone.

The fineness of detail in this exhaustive study will delight scholars and put off general readers. Students of the architectural history of New York will welcome the thorough discussion of individual commissions as well as the richness of Kowsky's
insights into the personalities of professionals and patrons alike. His reports of Vaux's tiltings with newspapers, city officials and even on occasion Olmsted himself, vary the long march of building commissions. Researchers will
pull the book from the shelf for frequent reference.

The layman, on the other hand, dulled by scanning a vast verbal landscape in which each feature has nearly equal prominence, might want to turn to William Alex and George B. Tatum's ''Calvert Vaux, Architect and Planner'' (1994),
a well written -- and much briefer -- introduction. Its large-format color reproductions (like that of Vaux's exquisitely rendered perspective of his second villa design for Matthew Vassar, as well as the colored lithograph of his
Centennial Exhibition project) far outshine the small black-and-white illustrations in Kowsky's book.

Kowsky does real service, nevertheless, in demonstrating Calvert Vaux's rightful place beside Olmsted and other better-remembered designers as a major player in the shaping of New York. Unless an unsuspected cache of significant documents appears
in the future, this will remain the definitive study of Vaux's life and work.

James F. O'Gorman is chairman of the art department at Wellesley College. His ''Accomplished in All Departments of Art: Hammatt Billings of Boston, 1818-1874'' will appear this summer.